ShadowBound: The Need For Power

Liam moved northeast through the dark forest without rushing.

Eldervale’s trees were older than the ones he was used to around the academy, or at least they looked that way. Their trunks were thick and uneven, bark split into deep ridges where moss clung like old rot, and their roots broke through the damp soil in heavy knots that made the ground treacherous for careless feet. The leaves above were broad and dark, layered so densely that they blocked most of the sky and turned the starlight into thin, scattered fragments.

Mist gathered in low patches near the ground, curling around exposed roots and sunken stones, never thick enough to blind him, but present enough to make distance feel uncertain. The strange mineral scent remained in the air, faint but persistent, like wet iron and crushed crystal hiding beneath the smell of old leaves.

The shadows felt deeper than they should have.

Liam noticed that immediately. It was not simply the lack of daylight. Darkness collected beneath the trees in ways that did not fully match the canopy, pooling in hollows, stretching behind trunks, and lingering under branches even where weak starlight should have thinned it.

The realm’s Myst structure was affecting the environment. Maybe not enough to count as corruption in this area, but enough to distort ordinary senses if someone moved too quickly and trusted their eyes too much.

So Liam did not trust his eyes alone.

He moved with deliberate care, placing each step where the soil held firm and avoiding roots slick with moisture. His gaze traveled constantly, not darting in panic, but measuring. A broken branch angled downward from a shrub to his left, the exposed wood pale and fresh enough to tell him something had passed through recently. He crouched briefly and touched the disturbed soil beneath it.

The imprint was not deep, but the mud had been pressed sideways rather than down, which suggested something had brushed through at an angle, low to the ground or moving with bent limbs. Not a running student. Not a normal deer-like creature either, unless Eldervale had decided deer needed fingers.

He looked at the guide’s memory in his head and compared it with what he saw.

Mimic territory. Choir Demon range possible. Glassmaws less likely in dense root areas, according to the guide, unless there were reflective stone deposits nearby. Vein Crawlers favored exposed roots and old stone, but their passage would disturb the ground differently, dragging beneath the surface or leaving hairline splits around root beds. This was surface movement. Light body. Controlled. Probably stalking.

Liam stood and continued.

A faint claw mark cut across the side of a tree several paces ahead. He stopped before reaching it, then approached from an angle instead of walking directly up to the trunk. The mark was too high for a crawling beast unless it had stretched, too shallow for a heavy brute, and strangely uneven. Four lines. Then a fifth beginning lower, like a limb had too many joints and touched the bark late. He leaned close enough to examine the edges without touching them. No sap dripping heavily. Recent but not fresh within the last few minutes.

Something had moved through here before him.

It might still be close.

He listened.

The forest was quiet, but not empty. Leaves shifted above him with a faint dry whisper. Somewhere farther off, water dripped in a slow rhythm that did not match rainfall. A small insect-like clicking came from under a root cluster, stopped, then resumed after he passed. The air moved lightly from the northeast, carrying the mineral scent toward him along with damp earth and something faintly sour.

Blood? No. Not enough.

Maybe old meat.

His fingers flexed once near his side, but he did not summon a weapon yet.

’Arrival is already doing damage,’ he thought as he passed between two leaning trunks. ’Scattered groups, bad visibility, unreliable communication, and mimic territory before the base. The academy did not even wait for Veyrhold to start testing people.’

That realization was not new, but the forest made it sharper. It was one thing to write arrival-phase failure on parchment in his room. It was another to walk alone through a realm where a frightened student could hear the wrong voice, run toward it, and die before Sheila ever knew they were missing. The first danger was not the ruined settlement. It was confusion. It was separation. It was the time between arrival and structure.

A weak group would panic. A proud group would move too fast. A scared group would overuse insignias. A foolish group would chase voices.

Liam stopped.

A voice had drifted through the trees.

It was faint at first, stretched thin by distance and mist, but unmistakably human in shape. "Help... please, someone... I can’t move..."

Liam did not move toward it.

He lowered himself slightly behind the broad trunk beside him and listened.

The voice came again, weak and trembling. "Please... is anyone there? I can’t... I can’t feel my leg..."

It sounded like a student. Young, terrified, injured. The kind of voice that could pull decent people forward and stupid people faster. But Liam’s expression did not change. He knew Ariana’s voice. Sheila’s. Dylan’s. Maxwell’s. Charlotte’s. Asher’s. Edith’s. Several others from the year as well, enough to recognize the more common tones in the second-year body. This voice belonged to none of them.

That alone did not prove anything. There were many second-years he barely cared to remember.

But the guide’s rule surfaced immediately.

Choir Demons could not invent perfect voices from nothing. They mimicked voices they had heard before. Past students. Former victims. Academy participants. Maybe scouts. Maybe something else unfortunate enough to speak near them before dying or escaping. If this was a Choir Demon, then the voice could belong to someone who had once entered Eldervale and never left cleanly.

The voice repeated.

"Help... please, someone... I can’t move..."

Liam’s eyes narrowed.

Same pattern. Same emotional rise. Same break between "please" and "someone." The fear sounded convincing until he listened to it as structure rather than emotion. A real injured student would breathe unevenly. Pain changed rhythm. Panic caused interruptions, swallowed words, shifting volume, and small corrections. This voice repeated like a polished hook, not a person trying to survive.

He looked toward the direction of the sound.

The terrain sloped slightly downward to his right, with mist thicker near the ground. The voice seemed to come from deeper northwest, but the air movement came from northeast. Sound should have carried differently through the trunks. It did not match the terrain. Either the source was not where it seemed, or the creature was throwing its voice through those unnatural throat structures the guide had mentioned too vaguely to be useful.

Liam crouched and picked up a small stone.

He weighed it once, then flicked it toward a cluster of roots several meters to his left. The stone struck wood, bounced, and rolled through dead leaves with a soft rustle.

The pleading voice stopped.

Not like a person startled and listening. Not with a gasp, not with a broken call asking who was there. It stopped too cleanly, as if the sound had been cut.

Liam remained still.

After three breaths, the voice resumed from nearly the same direction. "Hello? Please... I heard you. Help me..."

Wrong.

The stone had landed left. If the voice belonged to a student, they should have responded toward the sound, or at least shifted their call. Instead, the lure had incorporated the noise without truly locating it. It heard disturbance, not context.

Liam moved silently two trees to the right, keeping a trunk between himself and the sound. He placed one hand against the bark, feeling the roughness bite lightly into his palm while he adjusted his angle. Then he spoke, just loud enough to carry.

"Academy life."

The voice answered after a heartbeat. "Please... help me..."

Liam waited.

No response phrase. No questioning who he was. No desperate attempt to identify him. Just lure.

Confirmed.

"Choir Demon," he murmured.

He did not use dark magic. Not yet. Not for movement, not for restraint, not for anything that would announce more than necessary. He could have slipped through shadows, but that would waste a tool he did not need and possibly reveal more than he wanted this early. This required observation, low output, and a blade if the creature forced it.

Before he moved closer, a ripple passed through his bond with Nyxie.

She was not near him. He could feel that clearly. She had moved ahead, slipping through Eldervale’s shadowed paths under the instructions he gave her. But her mind brushed his with urgent focus, and then Shadow Memory unfolded inside him in sharp, fragmented impressions.

Footprints pressed into damp soil. Four distinct sets, one dragging slightly at intervals. Crushed plants near a narrow passage between two old trees. A small academy-issued clasp dropped beside a root, its strap torn. Blood smeared on a low branch, not much, but fresh enough to darken the bark.

The direction of movement angled east-northeast, not far from his current path. Then another image, uglier and brief: something thin and folded wrong moving between trees, its limbs too long, its torso hunched, its pale throat sacs swelling as it listened.

Nyxie’s impression carried distaste.

Liam’s gaze sharpened.

"Found them," he said quietly.

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